Planet Announces Next-Generation Products at Explore 2021

Day 1 of Explore 2021, Planet’s third-annual user conference, was a huge success with 6,300 virtual attendees, over 100 speakers, and a number of exciting product announcements. Attendees heard keynotes from Planet leadership as well as business and technology thought leaders like Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Moody’s CEO Rob Fauber, and Bayer SVP of Sustainability Sara Boettiger. What a day! 

Planet CEO and Co-founder Will Marshall began by emphasizing the importance of sustainability in our globally connected world, remarking that the space renaissance has led to a global Earth data revolution; this digital transformation is now accelerating sustainability initiatives for businesses and governments across the planet. Over the course of the last year, Planet has made strides in this arena by diversifying our key customer base across multiple vertical markets including agriculture, defense and intelligence, civil government, mapping, and a number of markets in humanitarian, ESG, and sustainability sectors.

“Every company in every industry will have to have a digital plan and a sustainability plan. And every government in every country will have to measure their emissions standards and environmental resources. You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” said Will Marshall. “Planet captures the daily change of Earth and is optimized to measure the understanding of the interactions between humans and the environment. We continue to build a platform and an ecosystem so that our data can be used to enable insights required for decision making for this new generation of problem sets.”

Will Marshall presenting at Explore 2021 © 2021, Planet Labs Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Today during Explore 2021, Planet announced the following products and partnerships:

• Pelican, Planet’s next-generation very high resolution satellite constellation, will offer increased accuracy, reduced latency, and enhanced image resolution. This constellation will enhance and replenish our SkySat fleet and offer Planet customers significant advances in resolution and intraday revisit capabilities, enabling powerful real-time awareness of ever-changing events. Combined with Planet’s monitoring data and analytics solutions, Pelican will deliver key global insights and drive rapid, informed, and responsive decision making. 
• Planet’s Fusion Monitoring will now incorporate synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data from Sentinel 1 to help customers see through clouds and weather that obscure optical data. SAR data will provide a stream of continuous landscape monitoring, enabling improved agricultural insights for crop health and key harvesting events. When paired with Fusion’s other datastreams, this data will boost the reliability of agronomic models.
• Planet joins the Google Cloud sustainability partnership initiative consisting of leading data companies committed to helping Cloud customers access datasets to inform global sustainable solutions. Planet’s unparalleled set of satellite images can be directly integrated into Google Cloud solutions to illuminate the impacts of climate change, supply chain activities, agricultural insights, and water availability. This data will provide global businesses and governments a comprehensive view of our planet and help them accelerate sustainable operations. 
• Bloomberg Philanthropies committed $25 million to create the Carbon Mapper Accelerator program to advance the deployment of emerging technologies and critical infrastructure to collect, make sense of, and distribute a rich global dataset of methane and carbon dioxide emissions. The accelerator will also help develop additional applications for the technology, which will potentially include ocean and reef monitoring, precision agriculture, and fire management. As Planet works with its partners to develop the Carbon Mapper satellites and platform, this accelerator will help the consortium leverage critical sensing data in support of rapid sustainability action. 

These product and partnership announcements reflect the expansion of our company in advance of going public. We announced earlier this year that we have entered into a definitive merger agreement with dMY Technology Group, Inc. IV (NYSE:DMYQ), a special purpose acquisition company, to become a publicly-traded company. This is an exciting time for Planet and we are continuing to innovate our products to provide timely, detailed, and unique datasets to customers every year.

We look forward to sharing more conference updates tomorrow. Be sure to tune-in to hear from industry luminaries including Planet CSO and Co-founder Robbie Schingler, Planet Chief Impact Officer Andrew Zolli, NICFI’s Andreas Dahl-Jorgensen, NASA Harvest’s Dr. Catherine Nakalembe, and a fireside chat with General John E. Hyten and Planet Federal’s Chief Strategist and Chairman of the Board Robert Cardillo.

To participate in Explore 2021 and access all the keynotes and session content, register at explore21.planet.com. To learn more about how Planet can help you transform your business, please contact us.